Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image and it moved and the audience loved it. You saw a train coming into the station, and just to see motion was beautiful.
The cinema language happened by experimentation – by people not knowing what to do. But unfortunately, after 15-20 years, it became a commercial industry. People made money in the cinema, and then they began to say to the pioneers, “Don’t experiment. We want to make money. We don’t want to take chances.”
An essential element of any art is risk. If you don’t take a risk then how are you going to make something really beautiful, that hasn’t been seen before?
This is one of the reasons I love working in the medium of the web. It’s still young enough that you can build beautiful things and bring to life experiences impossible before.
Make every week more screen-free
We’re pretty good about this, but we can still improve. The children get *zero* screen time during the week, so I think we’re basically doing ok.
A lot of “journalism” right now is barely-rewritten plagiarism. I’ll be glad when the Huffington Post/Business Insider, etc. style of aggregation fades from style.
It goes without saying that Massachusetts has the lowest percentage of uninsured residents—5 percent (Thanks Mitt! Mitt? You there, Mitt?), compared to 16 percent nationally, and a whopping 25 percent in Texas. On life expectancy, Massachusetts ties for sixth-highest, about five years longer than the worst-performing states. In another political universe far, far away, you might describe a place like this as pro-life.
A few other metrics of social well-being: The Bay State has the second-lowest teen birth rate, the fourth-lowest suicide rate, and the lowest traffic fatality rate. The birthplace of Dunkin’ Donuts has the sixth-lowest obesity rate. And depending on the source, the first state to legalize gay marriage has either the lowest or one of the very lowest divorce rates in the country.
Finally, let’s take a purely dollars-and-cents look at Massachusetts. No matter where you start on the political spectrum, this is the most important question, because many Americans believe we must choose between social investments and a competitive economy. So what economic sacrifices is Massachusetts making to achieve such extraordinary educational and social outcomes?
None, apparently. Massachusetts has the second-highest per capita personal income among the states. Unemployment in March was 6.5 percent, well below the national 8.2 percent. Its state per-capita GDP ranks sixth-highest. Its median household income (a measure of widely-distributed income) is fifth.
How many people still watch TV live? Fewer and fewer I’ll guess. Certainly not us. Other than Red Sox and Patriots games, we don’t watch anything live.
Even if we’re in front of the TV tonight to watch the hour-long How I Met Your Mother finale, we’re going to spend the first fifteen minutes of it watching something else. At 8:15, I’ll turn on the recording that started at 8:00, and we’ll fast-forward through the commercials and end up finishing it at the same time as the live show.
I can’t imagine this bodes well for the companies buying those commercials or the ones selling them.
It’s pretty obvious that I’m not going to hit the initial target of getting 39 of these out this year, but I’m still going to keep writing them. We’ll see if I can speed up the process a little bit, though.
For now, I’ll just quote the great Douglas Adams: “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
I’m all in favor of the recently-passed JOBS act, which loosens restrictions and regulations on investing in small companies. But, the downsides are obvious.
Human nature dictates that a lot of people are going to get conned. Some of my older readers may remember grifts from the sixties, seventies and eighties — the details change, but the story doesn’t.
Fred Wilson on online privacy
Prominent venture capitalist Fred Wilson gives some of his thoughts on online privacy. It’s worth a read by all of you who aren’t in the industry, so that you can get a basic idea of how some of this stuff works.
Scary ads from the past 50 years
After laughing at Senator Santorum’s epically dystopian ad, Slate takes a look at some of the other greatest hits. You know what this campaign needs? More Willie Horton.
Top 10 Lessons of the Iraq War
I hope our fearless leaders (and would-be leaders) review these lessons before embroiling us in another one.
How emacs changed my life
This is pretty geeky, but it combines two of my passions. It’s a slideshow from Matz — the creator of Ruby, the primary language I program in — talking about what he learned from Emacs, the editor in which I do all my writing, including this blog post.
Savvy consumers are taking it to retailers
“The customer knows the right price,” said the chief executive of J. C. Penney, Ron Johnson. “We can raise the price all we want; she’s only going to pay the right price. And why is that? Because she’s an expert.”
Google’s failed invitation to Google IO
You’d think the most powerful company on the internet would be able to get direct marketing together. You’d be wrong. Entertaining read.
How people are spamming Pinterest
Any social network is going to get spammed. Here’s an inside look at how people are taking advantage of Pinterest.
The next version of Serendeputy takes social signals into account far more heavily and will, definitionally, be more susceptible to this type of attack. I’m spending a decent amount of time planning for evil.
This is 10,000 pounds of awesome: 23 1/2 hours a day.
This is great, not only on the message layer, but on the medium. Watching this type of presentation is insanely addicting.
Tesla bricks
My family truckster is due for replacement in 2015. I’m hoping that the fully-electric cars are serving the early majority by then. If they brick like this, though, I’m staying miles and miles away. We had a bad enough time when the Prius battery emptied because Sadie left a door ajar.
Of course, you can also seize up your gasoline engine if you’re not paying attention, so maybe it’s incumbent on us to learn a little bit about our tools. I’m guessing that most Americans are post knowing how to care for their cars, though.
Why Angry Birds is so successful
A look at Angry Birds from an interactive design standpoint. It’s good to analyze why it’s so successful.
Inception explained
Here is another innovative use of design. Click through to this and scroll down to watch how it explains the movie Inception. Spoilers, obviously.
Early 2008. Sadie was a toddler. Lucy was a month away from entering the world. My employer was cratering and my wife was planning her father’s funeral. I was getting on a plane headed to Tampa to be best man in my brother’s wedding. My head was in a weird place.
As I was getting out of my car at Logan, I turned on an audio book to keep me company through the trip. That book was The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. And, over the course of that very strange weekend, that book changed my life. Here’s what I’ve learned, and what I’ve tried to live by ever since.
I’ve been following this story for days, but I haven’t been able to write about it because it’s so heartbreaking. Fred Clark has an excellent roundup of coverage.
Here’s the short version: It appears that a self-appointed “neighborhood watchman” in Central Florida saw a 140-pound black boy named Trayvon Martin walking back to his father’s house. Trayvon was openly armed with the can of iced tea and bag of Skittles he just bought at the store. The “watchman” called the police, who told him not to follow. The “watchman” then followed the boy, and minutes later, the boy had been shot dead. The “watchman” has not been charged. According to the state of Florida, he was “standing his ground.”
As a citizen, I’m generally in favor of strong second-amendment rights (a position that’s pretty rare here in Massachusetts), but the second amendment doesn’t give you the right to stalk, confront and murder strangers in the street.
It’s been a while since I’ve put up some linky goodness. I’ve been sharing links on my Twitter account but not here on the site, so I have quite the backlog. Let’s rock.
Netflix’s culture
This is a couple of years old, but still worth reviewing for anyone working for or leading fast-paced companies.
“Personhood” screws up birthdays
“[T]he legal drinking age here in Pennsylvania is 21. That age is calculated from one’s birthday, of course. So are all the other legal milestone ages, such as 16 (learner’s permit), 17 (driver’s license), 18 (voting and draft registration), 25 (renting a car) and 30 (running for the U.S. Senate). You reach each of those milestone ages on your birthday — the annual anniversary of the day of your birth, which is how we measure a person’s age. But with several states now considering “personhood” amendments to their constitutions, these laws will need to be changed. And so will the cultural significance of birthdays.”
Too bad this wasn’t in effect a couple of years ago. I would have gotten a tax deduction for Lucy a year earlier.
ProFootballTalk
I’ve been watching the Patriots’ free agents moves closely over the past week. PFT is one of the best places on the web for following the minute-by-minute moves. The PFT page on Serendeputy is my highest ranking tag.
The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus.
This is one of the best things I’ve read in a long time, from a New York Magazine cover story on the New Wall Street:
“If you’re a smart Ph.D. from MIT, you’d never go to Wall Street now,” says a hedge-fund executive. “You’d go to Silicon Valley. There’s at least a prospect for a huge gain. You’d have the potential to be the next Mark Zuckerberg. It looks like he has a lot more fun.”
Hallelujah. If we can get the best and the brightest building stuff instead of pushing money around, I think we’ll all be better off.
This morning’s conversation with the six-year-old, re: what outfit she should wear to Kindergarten.
“Given that everyone in your school is going to be wearing Patriots gear today, what is the probability that you’re going to want to be wearing your Patriots sweatshirt when you get there?”
I’ve got to lay off the statistics work for a while.
I started Sadie on the Encyclopedia Brown books last night. She’s usually pretty quick at picking up stuff, so it’s fun to watch her squirm a little bit as she’s trying to figure out the mystery.
In a couple of months, she’ll probably be solving them before we’ve finished the last sentence…
